Dour Quotes

#1. The railway trains full with reservists are no longer accompanied by the loud acclamations of the young ladies; the soldiers no longer smile at the populace out of their carriage windows; instead they slink silently through the streets, their packs in their hands, while the public follows its daily preoccupations with dour faces. In the sober atmosphere of the morning after, another chorus takes the stage: the hoarse cries of the vultures and hyenas which appear on every battlefield: ten thousand tents guaranteed to specification! A hundred tons of bacon, cocoa, coffee substitute, instant delivery but cash only, hand grenades, tools, ammunition belts, marriage brokers for the widows of the fallen, agencies for government supply--only serious offers considered! The cannon fodder inflated with patriotism and carried off in August and September 1914 now rots in Belgium, in the Vosges, in the Masurian swamps, creating fertile plains of death on which profits can grow. Hurry, for the rich harvest must be gathered into the granaries--a thousand greedy hands stretch across the ocean to help. #Quote by Rosa Luxemburg

#2. Come on home. The poppies are all grown knee-deep by now.
Blossoms all have fallen, and the pollen ruins the plow.
Peonies nod in the breeze,
and while they wetly bow
with hydrocephalitic listlessness,
ants mop up their brow.

And everything with wings is restless, aimless, drunk and dour;
butterflies and birds collide at hot, ungodly hours.
And my clay-colored motherlessness rangily reclines -
Come on home, now! All my bones are dolorous with vines. #Quote by Joanna Newsom

#3. Johnny Two-cakes. As a name it didn't quite fit him, but for some reason that's what he was called. Man was sour and dour. All business; doom and gloom to the extent it was actually funny. World was coming to an end. US was one tick away from becoming a third-world country's bitch. Everything was a crisis - including the fact someone had stolen his tuna sandwich. #Quote by Dave Buschi

#4. The eyes-the thousands of wandering, questioning, reproving eyes-they are all around us. They penetrate my clothes. They rip at my skin. They dour me. #Quote by Jessica Brody

#5. 'Under the Skin' is handsome, in a dour way, but inert - a cunning experiment that died in the shooting or on the editing table. You'll want to get the DVD, though, and not just for its study of Scarlett. Odds are that the Making-Of documentary will be far stranger and more fascinating than the movie that was made. #Quote by Richard Corliss

#6. You wanted Death? This is it. Dirt and decay, nothing more. Death translates us all into earth." He frowned at me, his cheeks puffing slightly. "Are you disappointed? Did you want a man in black robes? I'm sure I've a set somewhere. A dour, thin face with bony hands? I've more bones in this house than you could ever count. You've been moping over half the world looking for Death as though that word meant anything but cold bodies and mushrooms growing out of young girls' eye-sockets. What an exceptionally stupid child!" Suddenly he moved very fast, like a turtle after a spider - such unexpected movement from a thing so languid and round. He clapped my throat in his hand, squeezing until I could not breathe…I whistled and wheezed, beating at his chest, and my vision blurred, thick as blood. "You want Death?" he hissed. "I am Death. I will break your neck and cover you with my jar of dirt. When you kill, you become Death, and so Death wears a thousand faces, a thousand robes, a thousand gazes." He loosened his grip. "But you can be Death, too. You can wear that face and that gaze. Would you like to be Death? Would you like to live in this house and learn his trade? #Quote by Catherynne M. Valente

#7. What is wrong with the [tale of] Two Swords?" he asked, even more surprised. "Don't you care for it?"
"There is too bloody much romance in it," she said curtly.
Ah, well, here was the crux of it, apparently. "Don't you like romance?" he ventured.
She looked as though she were trying to decide if she should weep or, as he had earlier predicted, stick him with whatever blade she could lay her, hand on. "I don't know," she said briskly.
"I see," he said, though he didn't. He wished, absently, that he'd had at least one sister. He was very well versed in what constituted courtly behavior and appropriate formal wooing practices, thanks to his father's insistence on many such lectures delivered by a dour man whose only acquaintance with women had likely come from reading about them in a book, but he had absolutely no idea how to proceed with a woman whose first instinct when faced with something that made her uncomfortable was to draw her sword.
...
"I'll stop provoking you, but I will have the answer to a question. Why do you think most men woo?"
"Because they have no sword skill and need something with which to occupy their time? #Quote by Lynn Kurland

#8. You reach a certain age when reality grabs you by the scruff of the neck and shouts in your face:"Hey, look, this is what life is." And you have to open your eyes and look at it, listen to it, smell it: people who don't like you, things you don't want to do, things that hurt, things that scare you, questions without answers, feelings you don't understand, feelings you don't want but have no control over.
Reality.
When you gradually come to realise that all that stuff in books, films, television, magazines, newspapers, comics - it's all rubbish. It's got nothing to do with anything. It's all made up. It doesn't happen like that. It's not real. It means nothing. Reality is what you see when you look out of the window of a bus: dour faces, sad and temporary lives, millions of cars, metal, bricks, glass, rain, cruel laughter, ugliness, dirt, bad teeth, crippled pigeons, little kids in pushchairs who've already forgotten how to smile ... #Quote by Kevin Brooks

#9. Sure, I had gained a lot of weight ... I had begun to fear that I would never lose (it) and would be forever confined to this foreign body. The problem was much more superficial - but easier to grapple with - than my real worries about being trapped in my broken mind ... When I worried about being fat forever, marred in the eyes of those closest to me, I was actually worried about who I was going to be: Will I be as slow, dour, unfunny, and stupid as I now felt for the rest of my life? Will I ever again regain that spark that defines who I am? #Quote by Susannah Cahalan

#10. 'Up in the Air' may be a glossy production sprinkled with laughter and sex, but it captures the distinctive topography of our Great Recession as vividly as a far more dour Hollywood product of 70 years ago, 'The Grapes of Wrath,' did the vastly different landscape of the Great Depression. #Quote by Frank Rich

#11. We'll never find that one, and I'll be blamed," announced Edd Tollett, the dour grey-haired squire everyone called Dolorous Edd. "Nothing ever goes missing that they don't look at me, ever since that time I lost my horse. As if that could be helped. He was white and it was snowing, what did they expected #Quote by George R R Martin

#12. As a result of all this hardship, dirt, thirst, and wombats, you would expect Australians to be a dour lot. Instead, they are genial, jolly, cheerful, and always willing to share a kind word with a stranger, unless they are an American. #Quote by Douglas Adams

#13. Oh, Professor Lyall, are you making a funny? It doesn't suit you."
The sandy-haired Beta gave Lady Maccon a dour look. "I am exploring new personality avenues."
"Well, stop it."
"Yes, my lady. #Quote by Gail Carriger

#14. I'll fix things up with George soon as she gets here," Anthony mumbled. "You may depend upon it."
"Oh,I know you will, but you'll have to hie yourself back to London to do so, since she ain't coming here. Didn't want to inflict her dour mood on the festivities, so decided it ould be best to absent herself."
Anthony looked appalled now and complained, "You didn't say she was that mad."
"Didn't I? Think you're wearing that black eye just because she's a mite annoyed?"
"That will do," Jason said sternly. "This entire situation is intolerable.And frankly, I find it beyond amazing that you have both utterly lost your finesse in dealing ith women since you married."
That,of course, hit quite below the belt where these two ex[rakes were concerned. "Ouch," James muttered, then in his own defense, "American women are an exception to any known rule, and bloody stubbron besides."
"So are Scots,for that matter," Anthony added. "They just don't behave like normal Enlgishwomen,Jason,indeed they don't."
"Regardless.You know my feelings on the entire family gathering here for Christmas.This is not the time for anyone in the family to be harboring any ill will of any sort.You both should have patched this up before the holidays began. See that you do so immediately, if you both have to return to London to do so."
Having said his peace, Jason headed for the door to leave his brothers to mull over their conduct,or rather, misconduct, but added before he l #Quote by Johanna Lindsey

#15. Da. This is going very well already."

Thomas barked out a laugh. "There are seven of us against the Red King and his thirteen most powerful nobles, and it's going well?"

Mouse sneezed.

"Eight," Thomas corrected himself. He rolled his eyes and said, "And the psycho death faerie makes it nine."

"It is like movie," Sanya said, nodding. "Dibs on Legolas."

"Are you kidding?" Thomas said. "I'm obviously Legolas. You're . . ." He squinted thoughtfully at Sanya and then at Martin. "Well. He's Boromir and you're clearly Aragorn."

"Martin is so dour, he is more like Gimli." Sanya pointed at Susan. "Her sword is much more like Aragorn's."

"Aragorn wishes he looked that good," countered Thomas.

"What about Karrin?" Sanya asked.

"What--for Gimli?" Thomas mused. "She is fairly--"

"Finish that sentence, Raith, and we throw down," said Murphy in a calm, level voice.

"Tough," Thomas said, his expression aggrieved. "I was going to say 'tough.' "

As the discussion went on--with Molly's sponsorship, Mouse was lobbying to claim Gimli on the basis of being the shortest, the stoutest, and the hairiest--

"Sanya," I said. "Who did I get cast as?"

"Sam," Sanya said.

I blinked at him. "Not . . . Oh, for crying out loud, it was perfectly obvious who I should have been."

Sanya shrugged. "It was no contest. They gave Gandalf to your #Quote by Jim Butcher

#16. So now Nathan had a new partner, who, by all accounts, was a dour old drudge with nary a daughter to his name. She'd seen Nathan in town once since then. He had not looked happy.
But she was insanely happy, especially after what the doctor had hold her yesterday. With only a few days left at home, she and Freddy had dragged Jane and Oliver on a romantic picnic. So far, it wasn't going all that well. Poor Jane darted up at every sound. Freddy's mischievous brothers had convinced her that wild Indians might descend upon them any minute, and no amount of Freddy's posturing with the sword could relieve her fears.
Oliver was no help, either. He kept pretending to see feather headdresses behind every bush, though Maria had told him repeatedly that the only tribes in their area had left long ago. He was every bit as devilish as her cousins, who'd embraced him instantly as a man after their own heats. Aunt Rose had pronounced Oliver a smooth-tongued rogue the first time he told her how fetching she looked in her peacock bonnet.
Little did she know.
"Are you sure there's a fish pond back there, Freddy?" Jane asked skeptically as Freddy led her around a deserted cabin.
"Quite sure." He puffed out his chest. "I've caught many a fine trout in that pond."
"More like trout bait," Maria told Oliver, who was stretched out on the blanket beside her, reading a letter from Jarret. "I've never seen a fish longer than my thumb in that pond. #Quote by Sabrina Jeffries

#17. Repentance is a rescuing, not a dour, doctrine. #Quote by Neal A. Maxwell

#18. How can you be dour when you have a tiny duck? #Quote by Caitlin Kittredge

#19. So much of what comes out of the faith community seems so dour and somber, and we want to say, 'Hey, we're real people. You can be a person of faith and really enjoy life and laugh.' #Quote by Erwin McManus

#20. But truth be told, I'm not as dour-looking as I would like. I'm stuck with this round, sweetie-pie face, tiny heart-shaped lips, the daintiest dimples, and apple cheeks so rosy I appear in a perpetual blush. At five foot four, I barely squeak by average height. And then there's my voice: straight out of second grade. I come across so young and innocent and harmless that I have been carded for buying maple syrup. Tourists feel more safe approaching me for directions, telemarketers always ask if my mother is home, and waitresses always, always call me 'Hon. #Quote by Sarah Vowell

#21. He's usually so dour. But not now, not with me, and I like it. He doesn't interact with others without the shield he puts in front of him. #Quote by Lena Black

#22. A dour-faced woman was working at a spinning wheel on a doorstep, and she frowned at Logen as he walked past with the unconscious apprentice over his shoulder. Logen smiled back at her. She was no beauty, that was sure, but it had been a very long time. The woman ducked into her house and kicked the door shut, leaving the wheel spinning. Logen sighed. The old magic was still there. #Quote by Joe Abercrombie

#23. Em, we've known each other five or six years now, but two years properly, as, you know, 'friends', which isn't that long but I think I know a bit about you and I think I know what your problem is. Here it is. I think you're scared of being happy, Emma. I think you think that the natural way of things is for your life to be grim and grey and dour and to hate your job, hate where you live, not to have success or money or God forbid a boyfriend. In fact, I think I'll go further and say that I think you actually get a kick out of being disappointed and under-achieving, because it's easier, isn't it? Failure and unhappiness is easier because you can make a joke out of it. #Quote by David Nicholls

#24. Life works on the same principle as a boomerang. It's simple, really - what you send out you get back. A smiling face receives many smiles. Friendliness finds itself surrounded by friends. Giving hugs creates hugs. Offered help is reciprocated. In contrast, if you hurt people you will find much hurt in your life. Unkindness begets unkindness. Misery begets misery. A dour face will receive many sour looks in response. That said, it is easy to understand that if you want a happy life you must contribute to the happiness of those around you. #Quote by Richelle E. Goodrich

#25. It must be a very dour and pessimistic astronomer indeed who seriously doubts that there must be countless numbers of intelligent civilizations scattered throughout the universe on other planets which are orbiting around other stars. An attitude which asserts that man is the only intelligent life form in the universe is intolerably arrogant today ... anyone who holds such an opinion today is, fortunately for those who like to see some progress in human conceptions, something of an intellectual freak equivalent to a believer in the Flat Earth Theory. #Quote by Robert K. G. Temple

#26. I want to speak, show, see, and hear outrageously astute questions and comments. I want to be on the sides of pleasure and laughter and to disrupt the dour certainties of pictures, property, and power. #Quote by Barbara Kruger

#27. benedict tips out the door. the night dour and skanky with a rhumba of traffic. warily adjusting a long s/lick multicolored patch-leather jacket to cover ears. collecting himself before tilting forward/falling into rain's cool viola sting. #Quote by David N. Odhiambo

#28. Eating at a new, highly recommended restaurant is like a Very Important Blind Date, a contract with uncertainty you enter into with great expectation battling the cynicism of experience. You sit waiting, wondering about the upcoming moments of revelation. Somewhere in the back of your head is the dour warning that disappointment is inevitable but you don't really believe it or you wouldn't be there. The best eaters are always optimists. #Quote by Stuart Stevens

#29. Emma shifted her gaze to Steven, sitting just ahead of her at a table, Garrick Wright beside him. As though sensing her perusal, Steven shifted in his chair to look back at her, and to her utter amazement, he winked. She pursed her lips, amazed that he could take so serious a proceeding so lightly. He mimicked her dour expression, then turned to face the front of the courtroom again. The #Quote by Linda Lael Miller

#30. That's richt. When we were campaignin' wi' Marlborough oor lads had mony time to sleep wi' the canon dirlin' aboot them. Ye get us'd to't, as Annalpa says aboot bein' a weedow woman. And if ye hae noticed it, Coont, there's nae people mair adapted for fechtin' under difeeculties than oor ane; that's what maks the Scots the finest sogers in the warld. It's the build o them, Lowlan' or Hielan', the breed o' them; the dour hard character o' their country and their mainner o' leevin'. We gied the English a fleg at the 'Forty-five,' didnae we? That was where the tartan cam' in: man, there's naethin' like us! #Quote by Neil Munro

#31. If you have a sense of irony or humour, you're usually cut down, as you're usually distorted or misinterpreted. So it does lead to us being slightly more dour and staid and predictable than would otherwise be the case, which I personally find quite frustrating - because if you don't laugh occasionally in my job, you cry most of the time. #Quote by David Blunkett

#32. Sometimes films about oppression or suppression can be quite maudlin and quite dour. Sometimes you need a little sugar with the medicine and I think of myself as the little sugar. #Quote by Chris O'Dowd

#33. Morpheus takes in my dour expression and turns back to Jeb. "My word. You're leaving her in my care? How very mature and trusting of you, pseudo elf." He grips Jeb's shoulder. "If you'd like to get an early start, you can forgo the new clothes. She won't be wearing them once you're gone, anyway. Consider it my contribution to the cause." #Quote by A.G. Howard

#34. My feeling is, the Pilgrims were asked to leave England. England was never funner than when the Pilgrims split, right? The people of England got a little tired of these dour, right-winged conservative psycho-Christians wearing all black, bumming people out, confusing everyone by wearing buckles on ... their heads. "Is that tight enough for you, Cotton?" "Yea, verily. #Quote by Greg Proops

#35. Cheesemaster, I know that it is almost a matter of principle with you, but you should actually be careful wearing the same Face day in and day out. It marks the countenance. Some day you may want to use one of your other Faces and suddenly realize that your face muscles can no longer remember them."
Grandible stared at her, his face dour as a gibbet. "I find this one very suitable for most situations and people I encounter. #Quote by Frances Hardinge

#36. For too many generations of the common people of Rome were allowed no hand in governing, and their state religion had long since mummified into dry rituals that never touched ordinary passions. It was inevitable, proclaimed the dour scholars of the philosophical schools, that the Colosseum would become their chief temple and the fortunes of gladiators would be watched more closely than the rise and fall of nations. #Quote by Donna Gillespie

#37. Both of us on the cusp of adulthood, and this is how my brother and I understood what it meant to be a woman: working, dour, full of worry. What it meant to be a man: resentful, angry, wanting life to be everything but what it was. #Quote by Jesmyn Ward

#38. I don't think anybody wants to see a dour 'Star Trek' movie. #Quote by Damon Lindelof

#39. We like to juxtapose our music with a more dour aesthetic. #Quote by Matthew Healy

#40. People talk about confidence without ever bringing up hard work. That's a mistake. I know I sound like some dour older spinster on Downton Abbey who has never felt a man's touch and whose heart has turned to stone, but I don't understand how you could have self-confidence if you don't do the work ... I have never, ever, ever, met a high confident person and successful person who is not what a movie would call a 'workaholic.' Because confidence is like respect; you have to earn it. #Quote by Mindy Kaling

#41. The Irish do have a despairing quality of gaiety, but they have also a dour and brooding ghost that rides on their shoulders and peers in on their thoughts. Let them laugh too loudly, it sticks a long finger down their throats. They condemn themselves before they are charged, and this makes them defensive always. #Quote by John Steinbeck

#42. Pop music has always adopted the style of marrying upbeat melodies to dour lyrics. #Quote by Colin Meloy

#43. The lucidity, the clarity of light that afternoon was sufficient to itself; perfect transparency must be impenetrable, these vertical bars of brass-coloured distillation of light coming down from sulphur-yellow interstices in a sky hunkered with grey clouds that bulge with more rain. It struck the wood with nicotine-stained fingers, the leaves glittered. A cold day of late October, when the withered blackberries dangled like their own dour spooks on the discoloured brambles. There were crisp husks of beechmast and cast acorn cups underfoot in the russet slime of the dead bracken where the rains of the equinox had so soaked the earth that the cold oozed up through the soles of the shoes, lancinating cold of the approaching winter that grips hold of your belly and squeezed it tight. Now the stark elders have an anorexic look; there is not much in the autumn wood to make you smile but it is not yet, not quite yet, the saddest time of the year. Only, there is a haunting sense of the imminent cessation of being; the year, in turning, turns in on itself. Introspective weather, a sickroom hush. #Quote by Angela Carter

#44. The quiet gravity really wasn't his style at all, which had always been both needy and dour; anxious to be liked, but incapable of taking friendliness for granted. A burden of the hugely rich. #Quote by Ian McEwan

#45. SPENCE, THAT DOUR, IMPOSING LADY EAST OF LONDON, has grown a friendly face in my absence. I've never been so happy to see a place in all my sixteen years. Even the gargoyles have lost their fierceness. They are like wayward pets who haven't the sense to come in from the roof and so we let them live there, glaring but cheerful. #Quote by Libba Bray

#46. Nerd herd, focus. You're here to help the fledglings. Dour One and Dour Two aren't important," said Aphrodite.
"Dr. Seuss reference. I like it," Stark said, giving me a check-me-out-I've-always-read-books hottie grin.
Aphrodite frowned at him.
"I said focus, not flirt. #Quote by P.C. Cast

#47. She had a dour Presbyterian mind and a code of morals that pinned down and beat the brains out of nearly everything that was pleasant to do. #Quote by John Steinbeck

#48. ...the atmosphere after a March storm is always dour and pessimistic; we get them every year (and two or three in April for good measure, if we're not lucky), but we never seem to expect them. Every time we get clouted we take it personally. #Quote by Stephen King

#49. Most men complimented my sexual vigor, thinking I owed it to them. All of them credited themselves afterwards, but the dour clown just lay there. For a moment, I thought I loved him. #Quote by Stuart Dybek